It is necessary to calculate actual consumption of both direct and indirect materials in order to meet the demands required to perform real operations within a wafer fabrication facility. Currently, it is difficult to account for actual consumption of indirect materials such as gas, photo-resist, or slurry other materials used in a wafer fabrication process such as in a chemical-mechanical-polishing (CMP) process.
There is a lack of sufficient information to forecast material usage from the supply side of production due to a lack of information from vendors supplying materials, and from the demand side due to major product mix changes, recipe changes, and new products being mass produced in a rapidly changing high technology market such as the semiconductor or wafer fabrication industry. Thus, current material planning scheduling is not device or quantity sensitive and major product mix changes could result in bias forecasting.
Existing systems do not provide for a standard consumption database and procedure to track material consumption; additionally, there is no mechanism to maintain standard material consumption data, especially for new products. Existing systems also do not provide a standard planning method thus, resulting in arbitrary material consumption data results. Additionally, current material planning systems involve double work for material planning departments and engineering departments because there is not a central system available to backup the planning process for material consumption.
Thus, existing systems use intensive manual and fragmented processes to define material usage and forecasts, and therefore result in unnecessary wastage of material and associated manufacturing and accounting costs.
It is desirable to provide a method that measures cost and performance of both direct and indirect materials based on each materials' use in production.
It is desirable to use business process reengineering to refine the user operation flow in order to improve the traceability of material usage in wafer processing.
It is desirable to build up a build of materials for recipes defining what materials are used and defining an actual material usage structure of material within a recipe.
It is desirable to provide a system that provides reliable forecasting and budgeting by closely connecting materials demand to a master planning schedule (“MPS”).